Today I want to talk about a problem I’ve had for many years. One that only recently went away, but when I look back at it, I am fascinated. And wondering if I’m not the only one. It’s unlikely I’m the only one, but it’s so silly I feel it can’t possibly be A Thing.

I’ve got a thing for library book fines. It’s pretty uncanny, actually.

In college, I owed the libraries books well after I moved home for the summer. As a teenager, I had a book so overdue once that when I went to return it, I owed more than the book was worth, and I got in a lot of trouble. After I moved to Chicago, I got into the habit of checking out five, six books at a time, and ultimately would forget to return them — then forget again — and three months later, there I was, in the dog house, paying up big for — what?

I remember the books sitting on my desk at work in a neat pile. I remember walking during most lunch days to run some kind of errand, and somehow that errand never made its way back to the Chicago Public Library. I could have renewed the books, I could have returned them to a more conveniently located library, I could have just checked out a single book — rather than six large bricks of mostly unread content. Why did I think I was going to read six books in just over a month?

I suppose I have always wanted to be a person who lives in books. Not just reads for fun, but like those people whose houses are filled with objects merely meant to support piles and piles of books of different scents and eras, colors and sizes. Like Sabrina’s Dad or any mad genius in one of a million movies. To me, piles of books look like the way I want my brain to be.

So I’ve always checked out more books than I could handle, and the weight of the disappointment of not making the time to be what I thought I wanted to be probably kept me from dragging that disappointment back to where it started. It’s hard to admit defeat in the face of a book that was out of reach, too intelligent, too jargon-y. So there on many desks of my life have sat volumes and anthologies of physics and theory and psychological disorders and novels far beyond my comprehension.

As a reminder.

Before I didn’t have piles of books but tried to, I actually read all the time. Each trip to the library was a renewal of my fantasy child world, where I went away from the laughably cruel school day and got a free pass to sort of “buy” something for myself — during a time when we really never did much buying of anything without a bit of an ache. The Racine Public Library was like an episode of Supermarket Sweep, except in Supermarket Sweep, the contestants don’t stop to sniff the produce.

The comfort of book smell from even a very young age was so powerful. The sound of the protective lining crinkling as I opened the cover. The neat penmanship of the librarian who’d loaned this particular treasure out to the many before me. The pages with coffee or other stains. Leftover bookmarks or makeshift bookmarks like coupons or index cards or scratch paper. All just so … satisfying.

I’d kick my feet on the bus all the way there, wondering if there’d be a special theme or book subject of the month, doled out by the lovely staff. Would it be birds? Pioneers? Friendship? Holiday-related? And would there be NEW books? Jesus, don’t even get me started on being the first to borrow a book. I carried those with a responsibility far beyond my years and a dizzying sense of pride. Sometimes I’d worry the next book in a series might be checked out or that I might want to read a book another kid was looking at, as I knew my bad habit of hovering. But mostly, meaning like 99.9% mostly, I just wanted to get there and pick whatever I wanted in the only place I could.

As an adult, I walk into a library with the same excitement but a deficit in ability to make good on my dreams. I bite off more than my brain can chew. I end up with that ever-symbolic pile of books that some version of me at some time would have consumed almost instantly. And the overdue fines. For books that needed to travel less than a mile every time.

These days I borrow a maximum of two books. I’m actually about to finish one of my currently checked out reads, and I feel pretty confident in the other one, too. I’ve also adopted a new appreciation for renewals — it just takes a couple simple clicks online. Maybe I’ll get back to my old (old) ways again, maybe I won’t. I think I’ve come to terms with how I spend my time and what I’m trying to accomplish when I read. Back then it was to learn everything because I felt most of the world was ahead of me. Now, I try to fill silent time with something other than Felicity or Wonder Years on Netflix, so I read for pleasure. No more Botany for Beginners or whatever other heady, highly ambitious books I think I’ll just take down because yeah, there’s all this time in the world. Maybe — someday — there will be all the time in the world, but at least for now, I’m managing my expectations a bit better.

And loving how much less it costs.